We had proposed for ourselves a short excursion inland from Mombasah; but everything combined to oppose the project. The land was parched, provisions were unprocurable, the robber tribes were out, and neither guides nor porters would face the plundering parties then approaching the town. Indeed, it is to be feared that the entrance to Chaga, Kilima-njaro, and the hill country around will now be closed to travellers for many a year. Caravans dare not risk a contest with professed plunderers; and hereabouts a successful raid always leads to sundry repetitions. Such is the normal state of East Africa, from the Red Sea to the Cape. The explorer can never be sure of finding a particular road practicable: a few murders will shut it for a generation, and effectually arrest him at the very threshold. We had no object during a mere ‘trial trip,’ either to fight our way, or to pave it with gold. Our course was to economize life and money for the great task of exploring the Lake Regions. This was duly explained by me to the Royal Geographical Society, and no African traveller would have required the explanation. But a certain Herr Augustus Petermann, of Gotha, could not resist the temptation of taunting me with having hesitated to face dangers through which the missionaries had passed, ‘weaponed only with their umbrellas.’ This gentleman from Germany had visited England, and had created for himself the title of ‘Physical Geographer to the Crown’: when, however, no salary was the result, he returned to his native land, declaring that the Crown must take its geography without physic. His style of settling geographical questions, for instance in the ‘Skizze’ before alluded to (note 1, chap. v.), seems to be simply striking a mean between the extremes of the disputants. The process reminds one of a Bombay savan, locally famed, who, having collected every observation published upon the disputed longitude of that port, added them all, divided them by the number of the items, and produced _his_ meridian. As a reward for Herr Petermann’s ‘zealous and enlightened services as a writer and cartographer in advancing geographical science,’ that is to say, persistent book-making and map-drawing, he, and not Mr Alexander Findlay, received, in 1867, the Founder’s medal of the Royal Geographical Society; and I can only say that in this case the gift has gone cheap, and has been easily gained, as what is called in familiar French ‘un crachat.’